2008-04-john
From CS Colloquium
Computer Science Colloquium
Fri, 18 April, 2008, 1:40 PM, CS 308
Effective Computer System Design using Workload Characterization
Prof. Lizy Kurian John
Professor and Centennial Teaching Fellow
Laboratory for Computer Architecture (LCA)
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,
The University of Texas at Austin
Synopsis
Understanding the characteristics of applications is extremely important in the design of efficient computer systems. Contemporary programming paradigms such as object oriented programming, and Java have impacted the performance of computers. The characterization of applications allows to tune processor architecture, memory systems and system configurations to suit features in programs. Workload characterization is also extremely important for performance evaluation and benchmarking. Identifying and characterizing the intrinsic properties of an application in terms of its memory access behavior, locality, control flow, and instruction level parallelism, can lead to creation of small and effective benchmarks for performance and power evaluation. Such benchmarks can be used for presilicon design evaluation, and performance prediction. This talk describes how workload characterization of Java and multimedia applications can lead to better architectures. It will also describe how we influenced the SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks using our workload characterization and clustering techniques.
Bio
Lizy Kurian John is a Professor and Engineering Foundation Centennial Teaching Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UT Austin. She received her M. S in Computer Engineering from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in UTEP in December 1989, and her Ph. D in Computer Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1993. After 3 years of service at the University of South Florida, she joined the faculty at UT Austin in Fall 1996.
Her current research interests are in computer architecture, high performance microprocessors and computer systems, workload characterization, performance evaluation, and reconfigurable computer architectures, etc. She has written 1 book, and edited 4 books. She is also author of 14 book chapters and 120+ journal and conference publications. She has 3 patents to her credit and 3 are in progress. She founded the IEEE International Symposium on Workload characterization (IISWC) which is in its 9th year now. She has received several awards including the Texas Exes teaching award, the UT Austin Engineering Foundation Faculty award, the Halliburton Young Faculty award, and the NSF CAREER award. She is a member of IEEE, IEEE and ACM. She is also a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi and Phi Kappa Phi Honor Societies.
